


As You Lay Tonight Beside Me

by storyofapainter



Category: Mad Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-21
Updated: 2010-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-10 17:13:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/102136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyofapainter/pseuds/storyofapainter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Baltimore, Kitty notices Sal is sleeping better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As You Lay Tonight Beside Me

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted September 5, 2009 on LiveJournal.

  
Sal is a terrible sleeper. It is the most shocking thing after marrying him, suddenly sharing a bed with a man who rolls, grunts, talks, and cannot remember it in the morning. 

The day after their wedding, she asked if he slept well and he answered with such surprise, she knew he had no idea. She said she was just checking and didn’t tell him he had said _Central Park_ in a voice so sharp it woke her. 

Kitty starts to watch him fall asleep. She looks at the back of his head and wishes for something she can never find words for, but believes involves touching his hair. She doesn’t mention when his words change to a mixture of _silver lighte_r, _I’m fragile_ and a hatred of donuts. Sometimes she feels like she’s lying to him, but she likes being the only one who hears the things he says when he’s sleeping. Even if it’s never her name.

Sal sleeps soundly after coming back from Baltimore. She decides going home must have calmed him and forgoes watching. 

In early August it's s_hoes, pen, airplane_ and a swift turn which wakes her. She wonders what could have changed, because he looks the same in the morning as he did at night. She fixes his eggs and kisses him goodbye.    

After a week of utterance, he calls her in the afternoon to tell her they have landed an important new account and he has to go out tonight with the boys to show his appreciation. He comes home late and drunk and sleeps soundly. 

As autumn drops leaves outside their windows, he grows restless with _wallpaper_. There is another afternoon call, another drunken return, and quiet. It is not as though he didn’t drink with his friends in the in between. There were plenty of nights when he came home still laughing at a story Ken told. It is that he didn’t call, save the two nights he came home almost stumbling into walls and then sank into silence. 

Kitty drinks white wine and watches television. She has never felt as though Sal pays enough attention, but this isn’t one meal after which he did try to understand. This is leaving home for another place. This is having a place she cannot go. A place he can leave her for. She wonders if it’s a whore or if he loves the other woman. The amount of alcohol involved bends towards the former and even alone, she blushes. 

Kitty is not afraid to use her words, but she is afraid of using the wrong ones. If she is wrong, if there is nothing, if she accuses him and he has done nothing but try to love her-she will be the one who is breaking them in two. She thinks of what her mother would say and directs her suspicions to God. In confession, she tells Father Costa her theory. He tells her trust in God is the right course of action. God will set her husband on the correct path. Kitty nods and says ten Hail Marys. Sal stays silent. 

On November 22, they watch the news and he holds her hand. She watches him fall asleep, softly mumbling about black cars and pink hats. Hours later, an almost roar of _it’s dark now_ has her sit up, gasping. 

Kitty doesn’t go back to sleep, but sits in the living room and stares at the test pattern until morning. 

“Kitty?  What are you doing out here?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Did you have a nightmare about the... the shooting?  I think I did.” He takes two steps towards her and she can almost feel the invisible wall which stops him. “You should try again now.”

“Okay.”

But she doesn’t. She just sits there and when he leaves for work, she starts to cry. 

On Thanksgiving, Maria insists they go to church to pray for Kennedy’s soul. Sal tells her she didn’t even vote for the man, but Maria snaps for him to have some damn respect for the dead and Sal spends the rest of the day trying to achieve perfect silence. Kitty watches him flinch whenever the floor creaks and is decidedly clumsy as she sets the table. He has probably never heard his mother swear; Kitty has. At dinner, the food tastes cold and foreign and everyone acts like they don’t notice. 

When the phone rings at 3:30 on the first Friday of December, she considers not picking up. Wonders if he would come home to see why or if he would just tell her he tried calling. She answers and is sweet and caring when he tells her Belle Jolie is in town.

It snows. Inches and inches. He calls again to tell her he can’t travel; she decides he is staying with the woman. When he says _Central Park_ again, it is hushed and kept close to his chest. 

She describes Sal’s sleep talking to Father Costa and can hear him drumming his fingers on the confessional wall. This is distinctly unfair as the purpose of confession is to have someone listen. He tells her she is making a mountain out of a mole hill and God will give her all the answers-she must only be patient. She stomps out of the church and scatters pigeons off the steps. She apologizes the next week and Father Costa seems surprised to hear she had been upset.

The day after Christmas, the phone rings and Kitty answers, expecting her mother to be calling with holiday gossip from back home. It’s a man’s voice. 

“Hello.  Is Sal there?” 

She glances at Sal, napping on the couch, full of leftover lamb.

“Who can I say is calling?” 

It seems to stump him. “I...well. I am sorry about calling like this-”

“Are you from the office?”

“No, I’m a client. And I do know it’s the day after Christmas, but I do need to talk to him.” 

“It’s Boxing Day,” she says, without thinking, without realizing she knew it.

“So it is. Do you know why it’s called that?” 

“I don’t. Wait for a moment?” 

“Thank you.” She turns the phone upside down on the table. 

“Salvatore. Wake up.” 

He rolls over and reacquaints himself with his pillow. “A few more minutes Kitty, then I’ll help with the kitchen.”

“I did the kitchen. You have a phone call.” 

“Hmm?”

“The phone is for you.” 

He sits up, hair ruffled. “Who is it?  Unless the building is burning, I don’t want to know about it until Monday.” 

“He’s not from the office-he said he’s a client.” 

Sal pushes his hair off his forehead and answers the call. Kitty watches him keep his face very still, but she can see his eyes. They cannot stop shifting.

“Right.  I can’t-” 

“Yes.” 

“Yes.” 

“Okay. Goodbye.” 

He drops the phone into its cradle. 

“That was a client-” he starts, then his voice fails. “That was a client. I have to go into the city.”

“Today?”

“Yes, today. It’s a new client and he is getting cold feet and needs to talk. I don’t want to ignore him and find they drop out after the holiday.”

“You’re not a babysitter.”

“Kitty-”

“You’re not. And why on Earth is he calling you at home? What gives clients the right to bother you in your own home?”

“We’re in the phone book.”

“I know that. I didn’t ask how he got the number.”

“Kitty. Calm down.”

She feels perfectly calm and just looks at him. Sal ducks away and goes to the closet for his coat.

“It’s just one day, Kitty. Call your mother and you won’t even notice I’m gone.” 

She pretends. “Yes. I’m sorry. I forget how busy you can be.” She reaches his hat first. “Good luck.” 

Sal opens the front door. 

“In case something happens you’ll be at-”

“The Roosevelt,” he answers. Kitty sees the catch in his frame. “I might not be back until very late.”

“I won’t wait up,” she says, to the closed door. 

She calls her mother, but can’t concentrate on the people she has forgotten. She sees Sal’s eyes, darting around this room.  She doesn’t believe the woman would have a man call for her, but a client with no sense of manners who is stuck in the city for the holiday and wants a familiar face with whom he can share a drink, she believes. She doesn’t know if it makes her stupid or reasonable. She decides to be both and drinks some of his scotch. 

It doesn’t qualify as waiting up if she isn’t at home, so Kitty walks to the late mass. She lingers after and talks to the old women even though they always ask her why she has no children. She wants to be gone when he comes home. She wants him to worry and then tell him it was church. But he isn’t home when she shakes the snow from her coat and calls out. The phone rings over an hour later. 

“Hello?” she yawns. 

“I woke you. You didn’t answer before.”

“I went to mass. I though you would be home by now.”

“So did I, Kitty. But it’s snowing here. I have a hotel room. I will be home tomorrow.”

“It snows a lot in the city.”

“It’s December.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she says and hangs up. 

He comes home the next day, around three. His eyes are cheerful even as he complains about the hassle. He asks what she meant, before she hung up.  

“You woke me. I barely remember talking. Whatever I was, I don’t remember.” 

While he showers, she smells his clothing for perfume, checks for lipstick. They only smell like sweat and an ashtray, which is nothing new. 

On New Year’s they drink champagne and throw the windows open to shout and bang pots. In the living room, she breathes into the air and wants to catch the vapor. Like in a storybook, winter is invited inside, but no one feels cold.

Her sister, Petra, visits in January. They walk down Madison Avenue, despite the chill. When Kitty sees The Roosevelt, she insists they have one drink, her treat. The bar is gorgeous with its low ceiling and black marble, but it hurts more than she expected to see where he is without her. 

The morning after Petra leaves, she wakes to the tone of Sal’s voice drifting from the living room. She peeks through their half open door. He is standing with the phone in his left hand, smoking and not wearing shoes. 

“No,” he says, “no. That’s Valentine’s Day. That Saturday is Valentine’s Day. I have to be here.” 

“Me too.” 

“Okay. I’ll call back later this week.” 

She tiptoes to her side of the bed and pretends to wake when he creaks the door open.

She waits until evening, then asks, “What should we do for Valentine’s Day this year?” 

She can sense his hands fumble, even though she does not look up from sewing. 

“Petra mentioned she and Johnny were going on a dinner cruise. I told her it would be freezing. She said the boat has heat, but I still don’t think it would be much fun.” 

“Will a restaurant on solid ground do?”

“Surprise me.”

The day before her wedding, her mother had gripped her upper arms, looked her straight in the face and said, “Sex. You won’t always like it.” Her mother did not and never needed to know that before Kitty’s ex-fiance had poorly planned and even more poorly executed the robbery of a jewelry store, they had been sleeping together. Kitty knew it qualified as a sin, but they were going to be married before the end of the year, so God could cut them a little slack. After Dominic was arrested, she made him swear on his grandmother’s grave he would never tell another living soul. It feels unfair to compare Sal to Dominic, but while it isn’t terrible with Sal, it’s not better either. 

He takes her to Lutèce and it is beautiful, but then they go home and after almost three years it is still as though they are forcing the puzzle together. She has a shiver, like there is someone else in the room and it flickers fast to rearrange his face and she wants to believe she is not making it up, but the bulbs in these lamps have never lit very well. 

Kitty is not surprised when he announces a friend from school is going to be in the city Saturday and he’ll stay there so they can reminisce properly. She feels he is dangling the carrot out in front of her, but the second she bites, he will cut the string and claim it was never attached. 

Saturday night, she watches _Laura_ on television and remembers a portrait Sal drew of her before the wedding. When they were unpacking she thought it must be in the next box, but before they got to the last one, she forgot she was looking.

She flips papers on his desk. In the second drawer, she finds “The Gold Violin.” She had read it after Ken called and then tried to discuss it with Sal, but he had only nodded in response. She reads the story again. It’s much sadder than she remembered. 

She decides she will do it calmly. She will sit him down after dinner and tell him everything she has thought since April. He arrives home tired, but his eyes are so bright she lets herself become caught in the brilliance and leaves it for Monday. 

Monday morning she collects his trousers to take to the dry cleaners. He usually does it, but he had forgotten after coming back from the city. She matches the pants to the jackets which are already set out on the bed. She systematically turns out his pockets and finds two nickels and a folded piece of paper. She puts the nickels on the dresser and unfolds the paper. 

It’s half a piece of letter paper with the sketch of a man’s face and upper body.  He isn’t sleeping, but close to it, lids dropping, a broad, easy smile.  She thinks it must be for an ad for something like cigarettes until she reads, embossed in red ink, the two lines of text on the bottom of the page: _Madison Avenue and 45th Street New York City, N.Y. Tel. (212) MU 6-9200; A Hilton Hotel in New York City. _

He’s not a model. This isn’t an ad. This is the kind of drawing Sal didn’t make of her. Hers involved wearing a dress and jewelry and make up and not talking for hours. This is so personal she is embarrassed.  This is the pure need to capture something beautiful so when it disappears, it is not gone entirely. The paper crinkles in her fist. It is almost two before she feels calm enough to take the suits to the cleaners. 

She has words, sharp and blood-ready, which she practices in the living room while the chicken bakes. She takes his hat and coat, pours him a drink and prepares for the anger to boil out. She serves dinner and thinks about the paper which is in her blouse pocket. The words are waiting in her throat so she chews her first bite very fast and says, “The picture.”

He meets her eyes with genuine interest and, “You drew of me before our wedding. I think we lost it in the move,” is what happens instead of a shout.  

“What? We’re you looking for it?”

“I remembered it the other day. I was just wondering if you had seen it.” 

“No, I’m sorry Kitty.”  

There is a pause in which Kitty looks at her plate and tries to relearn her words. 

“Did you ask your mother?” 

“What? No. I will.” 

“You know, it might be in my old portfolios. I can check for you.” 

She nods and finds there is a cage very close to her body, “You know, I’m feeling dizzy. Do you mind if I lie down?”

Sal helps her to bed and she is asleep before she hears the door close. When she wakes before dawn, she pushes his shoulder and tells him he was restless. In the dark, he apologizes and she can’t see his face so she imagines the man’s instead. She goes into the bathroom and waits for the sun to rise. 

Her mind is at the edge of a blast zone pretending it can’t hear the shrapnel, while her body tries to run and has to settle for movements so sharp she breaks a juice glass and the pepper grinder. Sal tells her to please, go back to bed and not worry about dinner-he’ll bring food home.  

She retrieves the drawing from her blouse, looks at the pencil and the ink and tries to make it equal something else. She dresses, but falls asleep on the couch because she has never had an interest in soaps.   

She wakes up when Sal arrives with the takeout. She insists she feels better and misses the next question as she looks at the paper folded into her hand. 

“What?” 

“Your mother, Kitty, and the picture. I checked my portfolios. It’s not there. Does she have it?” 

“No,” Kitty says, even though she had forgotten to call. “She doesn’t have it either.” 

“I’ll redraw it, if it means so much to you.”

“No,” she says and behind her eyelids it is summer in Baltimore. Banished from the house by their mother, she and Petra play hopscotch with bottle caps and dare each other to squash ants with the toes of their shoes. Their three older brothers are two houses down, furtively sharing a cigarette with boys from the neighborhood. Nick, who is fourteen and still short enough to look ten, is told to go play hopscotch instead. 

Kitty is hopping from four to five and six when Nick runs to her and sticks his foot under hers. She lands on her knees with a cry. Petra shouts she is telling their mother and rushes inside. Ray claps his little brother on the shoulder and directs the group past Kitty and towards the gas station. She sits on the chalk boxes and sniffles as the blood dries on the hem of her dress. “He shouldn’t have done that,” Sal Romano says and holds out part of a Hershey's bar. She cries harder, but takes the chocolate. Sal jogs after the other boys and doesn’t look back.

“It’s not any trouble, Kitty,” he says. She can hear the footsteps and when he touches her cheek with one palm, she opens her eyes and lets him turn her face to his. “I’d love to draw you.”

She sees the man in the drawing moving and laughing. She sees Sal’s hand with a #4 pencil. She tastes chocolate on the roof of her mouth. 

“This is going to hurt both of us,” she says and places the paper in his other hand.

His entire face ticks like clockwork as he backs away from her and shoves the paper into his pocket like the memory of it could disappear too. She rises from the couch. 

“Why did you marry me?”

“I love you,” he says; the hand clenched on the back of the arm chair says, because I wanted to love you. He touches his pocket. “This is work. And it’s poorly done.” He turns toward the kitchen. “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions, Kitty.”

She crosses half the room and sees the stiff lines of his back where he is frozen in the door frame. The kitchen is dark and she cannot see his face or his hands. 

“I’ve thought there was a woman since October, Sal. I’m not jumping. I didn’t believe you had a friend visiting and I was going to ask you about her yesterday, but then you didn’t take your pants to the cleaners and I went through the pockets and you were with that man in a hotel room Saturday night and you weren’t doing business.”

He turns and almost shouts, “What do you know about business? Meetings are just meetings. The world isn’t as scandalous as you imagine,” but Kitty is ready for the noise and tops his volume.

“He talked to me on the phone so he must know I exist, but is he married? Do you call his house and make small talk with his wife? It was the day after Christmas and you spent it with him!”  

“On Boxing Day? He’s a client. It was business. It has nothing to do with us, Kitty, with what we have here.” His right arm twitches like it wants to reach towards her. 

“I think you are going to hell-”

“Kitty!”

“-and not even because of that. You lied and you cheated, Sal. It doesn’t matter about what or with who. The truth isn’t something I should have to beg you for. You could draw me a million times and they could be better than the picture in your pocket, but you wouldn’t love it. And you know that.” She bites her lip because the tears are welling up and her breath is escaping in tiny gasps.

“It is just a piece of paper, Kitty. We can throw it away. Will you stop now?”  

He thinks this is her surrender. She wipes her cheeks with her index fingers.

“You talk in your sleep, Sal.” 

“Come on, Kitty.”

“It’s objects, mostly, pens and airplanes-they change, but there is one thing you’ve repeated. What happened in Central Park, Sal?”

The air hangs like cloth between them. When he finally moves, she thinks he is falling down, but it is just his feet shifting so he can pull the paper from his pocket. His fingers smooth the wrinkles, but he doesn’t look at it. 

“Nothing happened. I was so afraid and I walked away.” He lifts his head, but she won’t catch his eyes. “You were safe. It wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to do it. But Baltimore... He just found me. Kitty, I didn’t know what it was going to be.”

At the edge of his flood, his lips start to move without sound and when he cannot jump, he waits for her push. She wants to know who he walked away from. Why they didn’t follow. If the man in Baltimore is the man on the paper. She wants names and plans and the first time he knew he was different. 

“I’ll need some money,” she says instead. 

She moves around the Midwest and doesn’t tell anyone what happened. She works in bookstores and tries to write on the weekends and falls in love again, but won’t remarry. 

When her mother dies, she returns to Baltimore for the funeral. After the service, she and Petra hide in their old bedroom. Petra searches the top drawer of their dresser for something to use as an ashtray and Kitty mocks the guests. Petra finds a seashell and smokes, still standing over the dresser, punctuating Kitty's ridicule with their old things. 

The portrait is in the second drawer. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the Fleet Foxes song, 'Your Protector.'
> 
> Thanks to ohmygodmuffin for the beta read.


End file.
